While breaking down the duality between head and hand has received a great deal of attention in discussions about curriculum and pedagogy, the extent to which that duality rules thinking about skills and skill certification has not been discussed. Although skill standards are promoted as part of a strategy to create an education system based on the rejection of the classic dualities, much of the discussion of standards and certification is still couched in traditional dualistic terms.
This distinction between an approach to skill standards based on the traditional dualities and one based on a more integrated perspective can be made clear by developing two broad models of skills and accompanying certification. One will be referred to as the skill components model and the other as the professional model. These two models differ along two dimensions--the conceptualization of skill and the role of workers in the development and governance of the standards system.
The conceptualization of skills is the first feature that distinguishes the two models. The performance and responsibilities of professional workers cannot be characterized by dividing their jobs into a list of discrete tasks or skills and then adding up tasks that the professional has mastered. The nuances of their roles and responsibilities make narrowly defined listings of their skills difficult to produce. To make sense of the work of professionals, it is necessary to examine their performance as a whole, to study how they combine the many components of their skill and behavior. On the other hand, the nonprofessional worker in the traditional organization works under the direction of supervisors or professionals whose responsibility is to combine the tasks of subordinates into a coherent whole. In this case, it is possible to characterize the effectiveness of workers by cataloguing the separate tasks that they can perform. Here the focus is on the pieces that make up the whole rather than on the entirety of the activity.
The role of the worker or worker representatives in the development of systems of skill standards and certification is the second aspect that distinguishes the skill components from the professional model. In the skill components model, while nonprofessional workers may be consulted about skill standards, the authority and control rests with managers and educators rather than the workers themselves. In the case of the professional model, the workers or their representatives have a crucial role in the definition of the standards and their certification.
Based on the skill components framework, workers are trained to perform tasks (skilled workers may know how to perform many tasks) that are explicitly defined by their supervisors and managers. They are not expected to know when to do them, how they fit into related tasks, or how they relate to a final product. Nor are nonprofessional workers expected to figure out new and improved ways of carrying out their required functions or how their traditional functions might be applied to different situations (Bailey, 1989).
Professionals or higher-level technical personnel are expected to be able to do these broader, more open-ended activities and the notions of skills associated with them reflect those broader expectations. Because of the lack of an overall organizational perspective in the occupational profile of nonprofessional workers, nonprofessional workers are not provided with the big picture of the organization or their role within it. The skills of the workers can be considered a tool box at the disposal of managers and professionals. Managers can select the individual tools that they need and it is up to the managers, not the workers, to select the appropriate combination of tools.
The skill components model also has a tendency to generate a proliferation of occupational categories. If occupations are thought of as an accumulation of well-defined tasks, then it becomes necessary to establish different occupational or job definitions each time there is a different accumulation of tasks. Wills' (1993a) cataloguing of current systems of skill standards reveals many narrow job definitions. For example, "agricultural power and machinery has three suboccupations--(1) farm equipment mechanic, (2) farm machinery set-up mechanic, and (3) tractor mechanic. Perhaps the best example of the explosion of job titles is the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, which includes definitions for over twelve thousand occupations.
This conception of skill has two important implications. First, from this perspective, the effectiveness of a worker can be characterized by a list of the individual tasks that that worker can carry out. This applies both to skilled and unskilled workers. In the skill components model, the difference between the skilled and unskilled worker is the length of the list of tasks that they can perform. Second, in the skill components model, it makes sense that managers have control over the process of developing skill standards and their certification. If managers--functioning outside the occupation itself--have the responsibility of making a coherent whole out of the work of the subordinates, then it is reasonable that they, not the workers, should set and regulate the required skills.
Much of the long discussion about professionalism has focused on the roots of the power and status of professionals. As Nelsen and Barley (1994) argue, "the analytic emphasis has been overwhelmingly structural and concerned primarily with explicating the role played by certain material conditions in the acquisition, maintenance, and loss of professional power and status" (p. 4). There has been a great deal of discussion on skill content and activities that professionals perform, but, in many cases, authors are interested primarily in the role that the content of professional work plays in establishing the social power and position of the professional worker. As Abbott (1988, p. 3) points out, most of the focus is on how professionals are organized to do what they do rather than what they do. Typologies of professional characteristics often do not include content. Abbott identifies four versions of professionalism--(1) functional, (2) structural, (3) monopolist, and (4) cultural. The content of the work is central to only one--functional. Abbott does emphasize that the abstract nature of the work enables the survival of professional occupations, but other perspectives give even less importance to work content. One perspective holds that professionals derive their status and position from the power that they have over entrance to their professions through their control of appropriate educational institutions and the certification process (Brint, 1993). More broadly, the "social constructionist" perspective emphasizes that professional status derives largely from institutional and social factors rather than any inherent characteristics of the work done by professionals (Attewell, 1990). Much of this discussion is critical of professional power, arguing that professionals use it to raise their incomes and prevent competition. By insulating themselves from the market, professionals serve the interests of their profession rather than the best interests of their customers. For example, doctors are often criticized for focusing on specializations, surgical procedures, and drugs and neglecting family practice and prevention.
Our concern here is not directly with problems having to do with defining and attaining professional status. Rather, we focus on two related issues: (1) the implications for skill standards on the content of work, and (2) the role that workers and managers play in defining those standards. Goode (1969) defines two fundamental traits to professionalism: (1) the knowledge base and (2) the ideal of service. How do these relate to the changing role of production workers in a high-performance workplace?
Collins (1976) describes the irony involved in the type of duties and responsibilities typically carried out by the professional. Professions involve interventions with uncertain outcomes which implies that an effective, reproducible method--a routine--has not yet been invented to deal with the particular problem. The concept of professional skill is paradoxical--it depends on the absence of an effective technique or technology to produce the desired outcome; a skilled occupation is one that cannot reliably do what it is called on to do (work cannot be carried out effectively every time and this becomes a resource around which those who are employed at the work build their claims to being especially skilled). Similarly, Wolfson et al. (1980) describe professional performance in the following manner: "The uniqueness of a professional's role lies in the `agency' functions of diagnosis and prescription. Professionals are charged by their clients with making important decisions on their behalf . . ." (p. 191).
To be sure, professionals must also be able to carry out specific tasks. As Hoachlander (1995) points out, it is possible to have a view of the skills of a pilot that is much more complex and nuanced than a list of skills or tasks, but a pilot still must be able to use instruments to land a plane. No pilot certification system could be considered adequate if it did not require that pilots could accomplish that specific task. Similarly, surgeons would not be worth much if they did not know how to make an incision and close it up, and a quantitative analyst could accomplish little if they could not use the appropriate software. Indeed, professional training often involves mastering lists of specific skills. Nevertheless, two professionals, equally adept at carrying out these types of specific tasks, could differ profoundly in their effectiveness as professionals. Hoachlander argues that a pilot who can hit the landing path every time will nevertheless crash if they use poor judgment in deciding when it is safe to land. One of the greatest criticisms of surgeons is that they do not know when not to cut, and there are plenty of analysts who have mastered the most complex software, but have little idea about which variables to include in the analysis.
For the professional, the specific tasks are seen as the foundation or enablers for more complex general functions such as problem solving, reasoning, or using judgment. In contrast, for the nonprofessional worker, the broader "academic" skills are the foundation or enablers of the specific tasks. Thus, the tasks are the ultimate activity for nonprofessional workers, while for the professional, the tasks are necessary (but not sufficient) to carry out the core activities of the profession.
As we have argued, in the high-performance workplace, it is the worker, not the manager, who must make sense of the work. In contrast to the traditional workplace, the worker must understand the relationships among the various tasks that they perform. As with the professional worker, the tasks are the building blocks that enable high-performance workers to carry out their broader functions.
Although the worker in the high-performance workplace does not serve an individual client in the same way that professionals do, innovative workplaces do require a stronger collective orientation. A fundamental principle of more decentralized organizations is that workers at all levels can be expected to make decisions that reflect the broader interests of the organization, and not necessarily the narrow immediate interests of the worker.[7] On the other hand, proponents of workplace innovation argue that the ultimate interests of the worker will be served through the effect of the innovative practices on the strength of the organization as a whole.[8] Thus, while the workers will not have a professional-type client-practitioner relationship, they will share with professionals a need to relate to a set of interests broader than their own, although ultimately they are expected to benefit from that broader ethic of service.
In most cases, the certification cannot be separated from the nature of the training itself. Many of the professions require extensive guided practical experience to achieve various levels of certification. For example, in 1992, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants issued a new policy report which called for the incorporation of practical experience into the required prelicensure education for CPAs. The Institute of Certified Records Managers requires proof of professional work experience before applicants can sit for the certification exam. The exam itself includes case studies that require essay responses (Wills, 1993c). Students in professional programs know that they have little chance to get better jobs without summer internships or post-training experience which give some indication of how they actually perform in realistic situations. And many graduate students learn that impressive scores on certifying exams are quickly forgotten if they cannot produce a good dissertation--that is, if they cannot effectively perform the core activities of the profession.
Mid-career professionals, when they market themselves, emphasize their concrete accomplishments. Where individual performance is difficult to measure, they emphasize the nature of their experience. In these cases, a long list of skills would count for little if the applicant could not demonstrate an ability to combine those skills in such a way that they were performed effectively.
The established professions have, over time, developed a body of specialized knowledge, codified and transmitted through professional education and clinical practice. As a result of specialized knowledge gained through study and mentored practice, professionals are granted autonomy in their practice on the premise that only those who have completed [a] rigorous course of study should be able to apply their knowledge and to determine the norms of practice. If teaching is to become a true profession, educators must reverse the traditional practice of allowing state legislators to set standards. (p. 135)While workers in innovative workplaces may not have full control over standard setting, to the extent that it is workers themselves who are expected to make sense out of their work, they must be integrally involved with the development of standards. As soon as managers focus primarily on the outcomes of work and give more responsibility for specific decisions to workers themselves, those managers have a weaker understanding of exactly what is necessary to do the job effectively. Thus a standard setting process in a high-performance workplace that does not give a central role to workers, will result in incomplete or inaccurate standards.
[6] One significant exception is a report on the training of architects by John Wirt (1995). Wirt uses the experience with certification of architects to analyze certification systems being developed as part of the skill standards movement. Hoachlander (1995) also draws lessons for skill standards efforts from the experience with training and certification of pilots.
[7] This is a common problem in team-based production in which the interests of the team may at times clash with individual interests of team members.
[8] For a more detailed discussion of the interests of workers in a high-performance work organization, see Bailey, 1993.